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6/16/2007

Interview on CBN

An interview that I had on Friday night on CBN can be seen here. You can watch the interview on the website. Besides my head being tilted to the side, I think that the short 3 minute interview went pretty well.

I don't argue that the liberalization of abortion increases the number of wanted kids. What I argue is that it increased the number of single parent families, with all the well known problems in raising children there compared to a two parent family. It is an empirical question whether the reduction in the number of "unwanted" children as a result of more abortions is offset by liberalizing abortion rules increasing the number of single parent families. The book lays out why there is an increase in out-of-wedlock births and single parent families.

Apparently Hospital Food in Britain is Much Worse than in Canada

Online discussions that I am having regarding Freedomnomics chapter 1

I have been having online discussions with people who have been reviewing my book here and here. Shalom Bayit's blog is moderated so it will probably take a while before my most recent response is posted. See the bottom of both pages for my responses.

Rationing in British Health Care

John Palmer has an interesting discussion of the British Health Care system here. This example surely fits in the save a penny lose a pound school of running medical care. Is it more costly for the patient and the medical system to have taken care of both kidney stones at the same time or to make the patient come in a second time. I particularly like the part of the doctor ripping off the electrodes off John.

6/15/2007

Scaring Kids about Global Warming

This is a very distrubing, though not a very surprising story, about how public school senselessly terrify children about the world being destroyed. Can't kids be kids without being put in the middle of a political battle?

"On record," gives people the impression that this is the highest temperature ever. What they mean is over the last 140 years, and there are real issues about how temperatures have been measured over that time period. World temperatures have in fact been significantly higher than today's over many periods of time in the past.

Is Sanchez saying that these immigrants can only learn English if the government provides it? Possibly if they followed Schwarzenegger's advice, they wouldn't have to rely so much on the government program.

John Fund on Pork Barrel Spending

This is from today's OpinionJournal.com's Political Diary:

House Republicans scored a surprising victory yesterday by forcing Democrats to back down from their plans to gut the few constraints on Congress's ability to slip earmarks, or "pork barrel" projects for individual members, into legislation.

Even some Democrats were stunned earlier this month when House Appropriations Chairman David Obey unilaterally decreed that pork projects would henceforth be "airdropped" into conference reports once appropriations bills pass the House and Senate. By circumventing rules designed to allow earmarks to be challenged on the House floor as bills come up, House Democrats were setting "a new standard for secrecy and subterfuge," complained Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, the chief earmark scourge of Capitol Hill. . . . .

Brendan Miniter adds this interesting insight:

Last night's Democratic retreat on earmarks was no doubt partly due to a letter Nancy Pelosi wrote a year ago to then-newly elected GOP Majority Leader John Boehner urging serious spending reform, including an "end to secret earmarks." Mr. Boehner followed her advice and helped rewrite House rules to make it easier to spotlight and remove earmarks that Members were using to direct secret pork-barrel spending back to their districts.

That letter came back to haunt Ms. Pelosi as her new Democratic House gutted these reforms and was getting ready this week to pass eleven spending bills to fund the government in the forthcoming fiscal year -- and, oh, also slip an estimated 32,000 earmarks into law. Under a new rule enacted last month, Appropriations Chairman David Obey would have been able to certify a particular bill "earmark free" even if it's full of pork-barrel special projects. Another rule barred members from objecting to a particular earmark on the House floor if it's part of a larger bill that itself contains a list of its earmarks. This applied even if the list is inaccurate and even if the earmark in question is not on the list. (The same rule recently enabled Rep. John Murtha, chairman of a defense appropriations subcommittee, to quash a Republican attempt to stop spending on an unneeded "drug intelligence" center in his district.) . . . .

6/13/2007

Talk at New York Young Republican Club on Thursday

UPDATE: This talk was fun and there was a lively question and answer period after the talk. It was also nice to meet some of the people there: such as Daniel Peterson (the club's president) and Simone Mele (with the New York City Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society and who lead off with the first question).

6/12/2007

Ben Wittes on Ditching the Second Amendment

I think that this is a great piece. I think that Ben is exactly right that the debate should be about whether to repeal the amendment. Ben and I will disagree over whether there should be a repeal, but that is the right debate.

Repeal the Second Amendment?

I respect Ben Wittes and this argument is surely the right argument to make for those who don't believe that there should be an individual right to own a gun. While I didn't attend the discussion because I was not invited until the middle of last week, I thought that Randy Barnett's response that repealing the second amendment would open up to question all other constitutional rights was pretty weak (though possibly the reporter just doesn't correctly describe his argument). It is very hard to repeal parts of the constitution and I don't see what harm that it would do to interpret these rights correctly and then have people realize that the only way that they can be changed is through a constitutional amendment.

UPDATE: Ben Wittes was nice enough to write me and point out that this was indeed not Randy's argument. Ben writes me that "His comments about the dangers of the intellectual arguments against the Second Amendment came not in response to my arguments about repeal but in response to the idea of judicial interpretation that renders the amendment a nullity. His point was that the same intellectual and doctrinal strategies used by gun control supporters in arguing against the individual rights view of the amendment could easily be deployed against any other provision of individual right in the Constitution. While I assume he disagreed with my call for a repeal, I don't believe he addressed the merits of it at all."

Most Americans Oppose Stricter Gun Control Laws

Finally a national poll that asks people if gun control might increase violent crime. On the negative side, people think by a more than two-to-one ratio that gun control is more likely to reduce than increase crime, but at least the poll allows those 16 percent to state that they think crime increases.

6/10/2007

Listen to Michael Medved's interview with me

Aging in Japan

One of the things that struck me in Japan was the number of elderly people. It seemed very noticeable. In any case, this might be a glimpse of things to come in the US, though nothing looks anywhere near as grim here as the picture in Japan:

This is very sad news. Ken was always an interesting person. I took him for American Economic History while I was a student at UCLA. I also had many chances to interact with him. It wasn't what I would call warm and friendly conversations (even when we would have him over to our apartment for dinner a couple of times) and he was often quite critical of my work, especially my dissertation on indoctrination which upset him greatly, but I valued his comments and I enjoyed arguing things with him. Indeed, I can only think of one paper of mine that he gave an unreserved positive comment on -- my work with Larry Kenny on the impact of women's suffrage on the growth of government. He was a smart guy, who sufferred great health problems during much of his life. I always felt very sorry for him, but I admired his determination.